Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

As the tech blogosphere continues to gush and agonize over the question-and-answer site Quora, New York’s question-and-answer site Stack Overflow has been quietly catching fire.

Stack Overflow is primarily a message board where programmers can share tips and tricks and crowdsource solutions to problems they run into while coding. The name is a reference to a programming error.

Over 80 percent of questions get a good answer, Mr. Spolsky wrote, and many of the new Stack Exchange sites have 100 percent answer rates. One of the issues with Quora, a well-funded Bay Area startup founded by former Facebook employees, is the high number of unanswered questions.

One way to solve this problem, Mr. Spolsky realized, was to separate Q&A sites by topic–that way each site attracts a more engaged group.

“We learned a long time ago that the only way to get questions answered promptly is to have a critical mass of knowledgeable users, so we have an onerous process called Area 51 where sites are proposed, discussed, and voted on. If a proposed site doesn’t have critical mass, we just won’t create it. Even if it does get created, it has to maintain a certain level of traffic and quality or we’ll close it down,” he said.